


Not as Such

by orphan_account



Category: due South
Genre: F/M, Humiliation, M/M, Secret Relationship, Verbal Humiliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-04
Updated: 2013-06-04
Packaged: 2017-12-13 21:51:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/829269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kowalski and Fraser forge a new relationship but not before talking (or thinking) about their previous relationships.  Kowalski's contribution to the new relationship is in pattern identification and word problem construction; Fraser provides some odd clues and solid data.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not as Such

**Author's Note:**

> Tagged for F/V, K/Stella and F/Victoria because those relationships are talked about or thought about in detail. The sexual/verbal humiliation kink stuff is talked about rather than enacted. 
> 
> A Very Kind Person provided not-entirely-voluntary beta on an earlier, shorter, much more non-linear presentation of this story. I'm keeping her anonymous in case she does not want her fingerprints on this one, not because she wasn't helpful with her notes or generous with her time.

The first time, Ray had no idea that a pattern was being established.  Fraser showed up at his apartment about two days after all that nutty shit in the crypt went down, and while Ray hadn't given Fraser his address, obviously Fraser'd had it.  So while if anyone'd driven up and asked, Ray would not necessarily guessed "Benton Fraser, RCMP" as someone who'd show up, unannounced, on his doorstep, on a Thursday night, he wasn't precisely surprised either when that turned out to be a thing that happened.

"Hey," he said to Fraser, who was carrying his hat, wearing a bunch of denim and flannel and leather and looking kind of like a legit cowboy, not the urban kind.  

"Good evening, Ray," Fraser said.  "May I come in?"

"Mi casa…."  Ray said automatically.  "Hey, where's your buddy?"

"It never used to…he stayed at the Consulate."

"Still livin' in your office?"  Ray did not get that, but based on case files and personal anecdotes, living in his office brought the number of stupid things Fraser did before breakfast down to about eight, low for Fraser but still two over Ray's own personal best of six.  Which, sadly, was also his average.

"For now," Fraser agreed.  "It's…expected."

By then, Ray had heard enough about Inspector Thatcher that he could easily believe that she would think it perfectly reasonable that an underling would sleep in his office and be on call except for a rare night off.

"Rare night off?" he asked out loud.

"Something like that," Fraser agreed.  "I'm sorry I didn't call, but it wasn't…practical."

Ray didn't get how not picking up a phone was more practical than walking all the way over just in case he'd be home.  But he was beginning to feel like this was one of those deals where the conversation he thought he was having was not the conversation that Fraser was having.  The question was, did Fraser think he could get away with this spy movie "it's a cold day for pontooning" shit?

"It's a cold day for pontooning," Ray said experimentally.

"Not especially," Fraser said.  That didn't help much.  Fraser apparently never thought a day in Chicago could possibly be too cold for anything, based on station chatter.  Certainly as long as the waterways weren't frozen over, he'd probably consider it a fine day for pontooning.

"Right," Ray said.  "So…did you want to borrow my TV or something?"

Fraser looked relieved.  "Yes!"  He looked at his watch.  "For the game!"

"Toronto at Braves, I'm guessing," Ray said.  Fraser looked askance. 

"Why would Toronto be playing Atlanta?"  Fraser seemed mystified, even though this had apparently been his idea.

"Inter-league play.  Jeez, Fraser, this was your idea, remember?"

"Right!" Fraser exclaimed.   Fraser seemed to be exclaiming a lot.  Ray tried to remember if he'd done that before.  He quickly reviewed their first few days on the job.  Huh.  That was a fair amount of exclaiming Fraser did in general, but it was usually more exuberant "a-HA!" exclaiming rather than this nervous stuff.

"Look, let's just watch the game," Ray said.  He solved mysteries all day long.  Normally he liked it fine when clues knocked on his door an asked if they could watch TV with him.  Clues that friendly were hard to come by.  But now that one had done just that, Ray found he was too tired to deal with it.

"Could I close the blinds?" Fraser asked.  

Ray looked around.  There was no glare whatsoever off the TV from anywhere in the living room at any time of day or night.  That had been the guiding principle around which all of Ray's other decorating choices had been made.  He looked at Fraser, who did a weird little bug-eyed head-shake thing that made Ray think of a Boy Scout demanding that a little old lady let him help her cross the street.

"Sure," he told the friendly, light-obsessed clue.  "Knock yourself out."

Fraser carefully closed all the blinds.

 

****

 

It happened again, this unannounced Thursday need to use Ray's television.  Ray figured out the pattern pretty quickly and had a good idea about what was going on: always the same day, same time, same desire to close the blinds upon arrival.

"This was something you and Vecchio did on Thursdays, right?" Ray asked the third week.  Fraser nodded, looking a little scared that Ray had figured it out. 

"And you don't know if anyone noticed, so you don't know if it's safe to stop," Ray further guessed.

"That describes the situation neatly," Fraser said.  "Of course, Ray Vecchio came over to my apartment, but I thought it best to uphold the pattern, adjusting for new circumstances.

"So Vecchio would come over to your apartment every Thursday to watch TV?"

"I didn't have a television," Fraser said.

"That's dumb," Ray protested.

"It's not a necessary appliance," Fraser said, all starchy.

"Not the no-TV thing, the coming over to watch a TV you didn't own thing," Ray said as patiently as he could.

"Oh.  Well, he didn't come over to watch television as such," Fraser said.

"Well, then what did he do?  Go over to play pinochle as such?  Scrabble as such?"

"Not as such, no," Fraser admitted.

"Pictionary as such?  Trivial Pursuit as such?  Help me out here.  I'm nearly out of such."

"None of those things as such," Fraser said.

"So what did the two of you do for an hour and a half every Thursday night?"  Ray was getting frustrated.  "Because unless it was fucking like bunnies, I am fresh out of…. Oh.  Oh, shit."

Fraser was staring at Ray, his face pale and sick in the late evening light that the blinds were trying to filter out.

"Hey, it's okay.  Come on.  Sit down."  Ray sat down on the far end of the couch.  They watched _The Dirty Dozen_ in silence.  Fraser opened the blinds when he left, even though it was dark out by then.

 

****

 

As soon as Fraser walked in the door the following Thursday, Ray himself closed all the blinds.  It was a gesture of support, which Fraser accepted gratefully and gracefully, going to the fridge to bring them each a root beer to drink straight from the bottle while they watched whatever they decided to watch.

Ray, though, was feeling unusually chatty, so he tried to expand a little on the previous week's clues.

"Okay, so I guess that you're basically worried that someone out there noticed that Vecchio spent ninety minutes every Thursday 'watching TV' in your apartment.  And now that Vecchio supposedly has his own place, and you don't, you think they would expect you to show up here every Thursday to 'watch TV' for ninety minutes."

"It's a possibility I'm not prepared to ignore."

"That's why you don't call," Ray suddenly realized.  " _Vecchio_ never called.  He just…showed up."

"Well, not _rudely_ ," Fraser defended his previous partner.  "We could've made the arrangements in person and followed through without telephonic confirmation."

That was very much untrue, Ray figured.  That they'd made the arrangements in person.  "Could've" was a long way from just "We made the arrangements…."  And Fraser sounded like the idea was just occurring to him.  Ideas, really.  The idea that it could have been something he and Vecchio talked about, and the idea that just showing up was possibly not the most polite thing in the world.  Even if it really had just been about watching TV.

Ray had enough clues for the week.  They suddenly didn't seem quite so easy and friendly as they had at first.

 

****

 

Thursday followed Thursday.  Nutty shit kept going down, and Fraser kept coming over.  Sometimes they watched a game, any game.  Sometimes a movie.  Fraser preferred Fred Astaire to Gene Kelly.  Ray liked that in a person, but sometimes you just wanted to look at Cyd Charisse's legs, so they watched _Singin' in the Rain_ , flashing past anything with Debbie Reynolds, pausing for Donald O'Connor.

"You think Don and Cosmo had a thing, back in the day?"  Ray asked.

"Back in the day?" Fraser asked.

"Yeah.  Before the stuff in the movie."

"I'm familiar with the phrase," Fraser said.  "I just wasn't sure it applied to those two, since I'm pretty sure they're still together at the time the movie starts.  Cosmo is a very tolerant boyfriend."

"He knows he's got nothing to worry about," Ray said.   "If Don really fell in love with Kathy, Cosmo would let him go.  That's what love is: letting go."  Fraser looked at Ray skeptically.  "Okay, I got that from Stella's outgoing answering machine message.  You hear something three-four dozen times, though, and you start to wonder if it's true."

"I don't think that particular piece of wisdom is all that wise, though."

"Look, I am the first to admit that I've been having trouble taking that one on board, but maybe if I had, Stella's outgoing message would still be 'Hey-hey, we're the Kowalskis and people say we're out of town.  But we're too busy swinging to put anybody down'."

"Your outgoing message used to be alternate lyrics to the theme from _The Monkees_?"

"You recognized...? Never mind. It was just on the private home line, for people who knew us well enough that they'd understand 'swinging' was dancing and not the other thing.  But that's really not the point.  The point is, I started thinking that being a possessive jerk was the best way to prove my love to her and it did not…. Oh.  Oh, shit.  Vecchio was kind of like that, huh?"

"Not as such…well, he did threaten to kill my girlfriend once," Fraser said.  Ray allowed himself the luxury of boggling at Fraser.  How was that not possessive "as such?"  

"It was in the vein of 'you hurt him, I'll kill you'," Fraser explained.  Ray was fairly sure that was still a pretty possessive statement.  

"She hurt you?" Ray asked.  The Other Ray had to have thought she would.

"We later found out she shot Diefenbaker and tried to ruin Ray Vecchio's career."  Okay, so she sounded even more unhealthfully possessive than "you hurt him, I'll kill you."  Ray wondered if he could get Stella over to hear some of this shit.  Maybe then she'd see how much worse things could get out there.  Ray was pretty sure by now it was too late for her to lower the bar for him, but maybe she'd at least give the next guy some slack.

"So did he make good?"

"Make good?  Oh, on the threat?  No," Fraser said.  Ray would've relaxed, but he sensed a giant "however" on the horizon.

"However," Fraser said almost apologetically, "he did shoot me in the back."

"Jesus fuck!"  Ray exclaimed.   "He threatened to kill her if she hurt you, she hurt both of you, so he shot _you_?" Wow.  This was one guy who really needed a buddy.

"He was aiming for her," Fraser said.  

"That does not make it okay, buddy," Ray said, suddenly feeling like he'd been hit with a ton of empathic bricks with Stella's name on each of them.  "Maybe it's for the best that he went away, you know?"

"Oh, that was before we started seeing each other romantically," Fraser said, like that made it all okay.

"Buddy, you've gotta believe me when I tell you that the timing still does not make it okay.  Also?  Not sure 'romantically' is really the right word unless you're being ironical."

"More euphemistic," Fraser said.  "I think the phrase 'fucking like bunnies' was probably more apt than I would've liked."

"Oh.  Oh, shit," Ray said.  "That was just…. Okay, when I said that before, and just now, you'd just shocked me, is all.  I'm sure it was…that you…I bet it was real romantic and all."

"Not really," Fraser said.  "Neither of us considered it a truly good night until at least one of us was wearing some combination of the words 'dirty' and 'come' and 'slut' on his skin."

Nope.  Fraser didn't get to shock Ray again, into deterrence or anywhere else.  And even if he did, that would've been the wrong way to go about it.  Also, Ray was beginning to believe that Fraser needed more than one kind of buddy.  That was fine with Ray.  Ray was down with that idea.  

"Let me guess…the graffiti was done using materials that made the second one kinda…what's the word where something's already been said so you don't really need to say it again?"

"Redundant?"

"Yeah.  I'm guessing that 'come' pretty much…spelled itself?"

"Indeed," Fraser said, sounding almost wistful.  "It took six months before he finally remembered to spell it with four letters instead of three."

"Stella always said that was the difference between porn and erotica," Ray offered.  He could totally work with this line of conversation.

"How…. Oh.  In porn, it's 'c-u-m' and in erotica it's 'c-o-m-e'?"

"Stella's classy as shit," Ray said.  Fraser nodded.

"Vecchio, though, kinda sounds like not so much," Ray said quietly.

"Oh, he was all right," Fraser said.  "He wasn't some sort of walking, talking cliché of possessive abuse as you seem to be inferring."

"What was the split?"

"I'm sorry?"

"On who had stuff spelled on him with the other guy's spunk."

"Oh."  Fraser thought for a moment, looking like he was actually tallying it up.  "About 73/27, I'd say."

"In favor of…."

"How does one define 'favor' in this situation?"

"Let's say that having someone use jizz to write 'dirty come slut' on your skin is your idea of generosity and grace," Ray suggested.

"Then that split was very much in my favor," Fraser said.

"Say that having someone use jizz to write 'dirty come slut' is...whatever you really think it is. What do you think the split should be, ideally?"

Fraser thought for a moment.  "Fifty-fifty," he finally said.

Ray muttered in Polish.

"I don't think knowledge of carnal trigonometry would help," Fraser said.  "It's really more a matter of fractions."

"You do not speak Polish!"  Ray glowered at Fraser.  "You just…. You do not get to speak Polish!"

"Ah…lucky guess?"

"That's more like it," Ray said.  He thought for awhile.  There had to be some way to get away from math problems and back on track.

"What if you got your own place?"  Ray tried.

"I'm not sure," Fraser said, sounding offended at his own lack of knowledge.  "I think…."

"They might expect you'd move in here instead?"  Ray guessed.

"Maybe.  Maybe not.  I just don't know."

"So better safe than sorry, is your way of thinking."

"Prudence would seem to be called for."

"She the lady who filmed your dirty, dirty word games?"

"No!  Nobody…they weren't…there was no Prudence."

Ray just looked at Fraser.  

"I can't believe I let you set me up like that," Fraser said, finally sounding more mad than sad.

"You're pretty rattled," Ray said, prepared to be generous.  "So, you want to just keep showing up here for an hour and a half every Thursday, close the blinds and then pitch pennies and shoot the breeze until you'd normally be done getting insulting things written on your skin?"

"Or writing them on…someone else's," Fraser said.  Ray remembered that wasn't always the case, though.  Looked like it was back to math problems.

"Twenty-seven times out of a hundred," Ray pointed out.  "When you would have preferred to get to do that fifty times out of a hundred, which means you're short by…."  

"Twenty-three."  

"So let's see...let's say I'm willing to assume the degradation ratio at Fraser rates rather than Vecchio rates," Ray offered. "That would mean you'd get to demean me for the next twenty-three Thursdays?"

Fraser frowned.  "Not exactly.  That would bring the total up to one hundred and twenty-three.  Half of which is…."

"Sixty one and a half," Ray said proudly.  Fraser nodded.  "Wow.  So it was exactly 100 Thursdays?"

"Well, we put in the occasional Tuesday.  The odd Wednesday.  Sometimes if Monday was particularly stressful…."

"So a hundred times over a variety of days, but largely Thursdays?"

"Essentially.  Always Thursdays."

"So…how many times would I have to be your dirty come slut in order to get a perfect Fraser degradation ratio of fifty percent?"

"I…these were not the kind of word problems my grandparents had me do."

"That's the most normal thing you've said…well, since I met you, really."

"That is a very honest response, Ray.  Thank you for that."  Fraser looked surprised that Ray had been courteous enough to notice and acknowledge that Fraser was a bit of an eccentric without outright calling him a freak.  Ray would probably have to start paying attention to shit like that if he aspired to be a Cosmo-type boyfriend instead of a Ray-type boyfriend.  Neither Old Ray Kowalski nor Previous Ray Vecchio seemed like much of a prince right about now.

"Okay, so look, the Kowalski degradation rate is about the same as the Fraser degradation rate," Ray confessed.

"Is it?"  Fraser looked surprised.

"Pretty much.  You think you and Vecchio invented sexy humiliation?  Stella's sexy humiliation ratio was one hundred, and not because she thought she was anyone's dirty anything ever.  Fortunately, the frequency on that one was maybe twice a year, tops."

"So you're also owed about twenty-three instances of someone being your come slut before you get your ratio balanced?"

"Nah.  I took care of that already.  I'm pretty much clear at this point."  Fraser looked thoughtful at this revelation.  Fortunately, he either didn't bother to do the math or did and didn't care that Ray had gone through his twenty-three ratio-balancing activities fairly quickly.  And it wasn't that bad, since Ray's raw numbers were more like seven; Stella's sexy humiliation phase had, probably not through sheerest chance, not started until fairly late in their marriage.

"Hmm.  So we could possibly reset the counter to zero for both of us?"

"Yeah, I think we could."  The idea of starting this… _anything_ …with a clean sheet appealed to Ray.  

"Hmm.  So who would…."  Fraser clearly wanted to do the right thing and truly start off on an equally unequal footing but had no idea how to go about that.  Luckily for them both, Ray had strong opinions about this subject.

"First guy to admit it will wear it."  

He figured it would be a good way to figure out Fraser's best, most secret….

"I'm a dirty come slut," Fraser said promptly.

Ray blinked.  "Well, that was abrupt," he complained.

"I'd like to think it was efficient," Fraser countered.

Ray shook his head in sadness over the apparent limitations of Fraser's imagination.  "You really want me to just write it on you and then sit there for," Ray checked his watch, "forty-eight minutes, crusting over, all cold and stuff, before you go back to your lonely little international diplomatic mission?"

"Oh.  I didn't realize we had so much time."

"You and Vecchio ever go long?"

"Once we went to a hundred and ten minutes," Fraser said after careful thought.  Ray checked his watch again.

"We now have an hour and five minutes for our race to the bottom," Ray said after thinking it through carefully.

"Okay, then!" Fraser exclaimed exuberantly.  "But Ray, I should warn you…."

"Yeah?" Ray asked, only half paying attention as he pulled off his shirt.

"Tonight, I'm playing to lose."

"Which means we'll both win," Ray said and Fraser seemed to be perfectly happy with the logic of Ray's analysis.

Sometimes, Ray thought, math really was your friend, even if you never "solved" the "problem."

 


End file.
